


Ghosts

by PepperSpicedLatte



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Brief mention of sexual assault, Either way they're gay for one another, Emily's not doing very well and she needs a hug, F/F, It's okay though, JJ will hug her, Mental Health Issues, Pre-established Emily and JJ, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25809337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperSpicedLatte/pseuds/PepperSpicedLatte
Summary: Ever since she died, all Emily'd felt like is a ghost. But maybe its her own ghosts that are haunting her.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss
Comments: 2
Kudos: 49





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all okay, this is my first CM fanfic and my own take on the whole Emily and Doyle situation. Basically Emily's just sad and she needs a hug. 
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: Brief mention of sexual assault.

The air was cold, nippy. The type to make the tips of your fingers, nose and ears sting as you went from the warm of the inside to the chill of the outside. There was a thin layer of frost on the ground, the white in the low sun making the grass, the pavement, the cars sparkle as it began to slowly melt. It was a time between the height of the autumn colours which had spread across the city like a wildfire as the leaves turned to golds and reds, and when winter truly set in and everything was bare and void of the life it had once held.

Late November wasn’t a time that Emily particularly minded. It was far enough past her birthday that she didn’t have to think about it anymore and just close enough to Christmas that it wasn’t annoying. Yes, the lights were up, and the shops were starting to fill with decorations, but it wasn’t too bad. No, late November Emily didn’t mind. It was the holiday situated there that she didn’t like. Emily had never stayed in the US long enough when she was a child to celebrate more than two Thanksgivings on home soil. They had had it at the different embassies wherever her mother had been posted, but it was never a holiday she looked forward too. It had meant having to spend time with her parents and their constant finding of her faults, of everything in their eyes that she had done wrong. It had meant having to pretend to be someone she wasn’t for their important friends and colleagues, all whilst playing with the food on her plate because she had grown to hate roast dinners, especially roast turkey because of them.

In fact, the only Thanksgiving Emily had ever really liked was the one she had had in her junior year of college. She and her college friends had decided to do their own that year and the cooking had been such a disaster that they’d gotten pizza instead. A memory she would always cherish, being around people who wanted her there. But no, Emily didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving anymore, declined every invitation her mother or one of the team gave her and simply used the day off if they weren’t busy on a case to simply relax and have some alone time. This meant takeaway, wine and a good movie or reading her newest book. There was nothing special about Thanksgiving Thursday to her. It was simply a day off. This year however, things were a little different.

Everything was different this year. Everything was…off. The first two months of the year had been fine, and then she had died and become a ghost for seven months, only to return as if nothing had happened. Emily was used to that. Used to pretending that things in her life hadn’t happened, blocking them out and pushing them down into the depths of her mind to be forgotten. Except it hadn’t been that easy this time. The brunette hadn’t come back as complete as she liked to think she had, and her façade was starting to crumble. She loved being back with her team, her best friends, her family; loved being in the city she had finally managed to call home. Nothing had changed and yet everything was different. Emily didn’t get the same feeling she had before walking down the streets of D.C, didn’t feel one hundred percent that she fit into the BAU anymore. And it wasn’t even anything big, it was small things, things that no one else not even Reid would have noticed. The slight change of the colour of the metro lines, one of her favourite bookstores having closed, the fact that they used a different hot chocolate power in her drinks, that they had _new chairs_ in the bullpen. None of this should have mattered because they were such small inconvenient things and yet, it made Emily feel as if the Earth was off its axis and that the tilt was wrong. She didn’t feel a part of this world, as if she was a visitor simply looking in. A ghost.

The cemetery was quiet at this time of the morning, or maybe it was because it had barely been open for ten minutes when Emily had parked the car and made her way in. Most people would be with their families at this time, and she knew later in the day those families would most likely make their way to the graves of their loved ones after they’d gorged on food and company. Cemeteries had never freaked Emily out as a child. The large, old places of the dead in cities such as Rome, Mexico City and Paris had brought her some sort of peace, to know she wasn’t the only lost soul wandering around unsure as to where to go in this life. Even now the quiet of the white marble and stone gave her the tranquility she needed as she walked down the path, clear of her destination.

Unlike other people she was not there to visit a person, at least not in the traditional sense. She _was_ there to visit someone; except they weren’t there. They were across the Atlantic Ocean buried in a non-descript grave in a small Irish town outside of Belfast. Instead, Emily Prentiss found her way to the grave she had supposedly been buried in to sit down in front of. They had removed the headstone, thank god. Not having to be reminded of her death more than she already was seemed to be a small miracle. The coffin was still in the ground however; they hadn’t gotten around to taking it out yet. The once soil had turned into life and grass which was now drooping underneath the frost which lay upon it.

Emily stared at the ground her hands in her coat pockets, the only notion from her that she was a real person being the warm breath from her lips visibly seen in the cold air. She didn’t move for a long time, simply staring at the spot in which she was supposed to be buried, where she was supposed to be _dead_. Yet, even with being a living, breathing person there were some days like today where Emily didn’t feel alive. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before as her mind had been filled with memories, nightmares – though was there really a difference nowadays between the two? She had spent the night thinking and not thinking; thinking so hard that she depersonalized from the situation, looking down at herself as if this was someone else’s memories and thoughts. This wasn’t her life, it couldn’t be.

Except it was and she was surely drowning in it.

‘’I hope you’re happy.’’ The brunette murmured under her breath, never taking her eyes off the ground. She could feel another presence there, though she knew it wasn’t real – that anyone was actually there. But she could still feel him, his energy big and foreboding as it had always been. It was so easy for her to tell when Doyle was around even if he was dead. He still had and would always have a piece of her in his grasp and that last piece would make him forever very much alive even when his body was rotting in the ground.

‘’You got what you wanted. You destroyed me completely.’’ And god had it been hard to try and put herself back together again. Emily had tried for months in Paris to rebuild herself, to put each piece together again exactly where it had been, but she was chipped and broken and the glue holding her up wasn’t as strong as it used to be. She was sure she had done a decent enough job as she got her life back together to normality but coming back to D.C and the BAU had proven her wrong. She was more chipped than she had first thought and yet no one had noticed.

Now Emily was a master at hiding herself. Years of high expectations and working undercover had taught her to show what she only wanted others to see, to make them think something entirely different to what she was. And it had worked well for the most part. She had managed to stay undercover in Doyle’s life for nine months, had managed to hide that part of her past from the rest of her team for five years until it was dredged up again. If he hadn’t of escaped from prison it would still have been hidden deep and no one would have known Lauren Reynolds ever existed. She wouldn’t have been standing here how at her fake grave, talking to a dead man if it hadn’t of been for him. Ian Doyle had tipped her life upside down and she wasn’t sure she could get it perfect ever again.

But it still stood that none of her team had noticed, at least not in the way she had wanted them too. For the first few weeks they were wary of course, still getting over the shock of her surprise arrival but after that everything fell into place once more. They did their job and sometimes they hung out with one another after work and every so often they’d ask if she was alright if she went quiet but that was it. Hotch had noticed the most, it was his job as leader of the team anyway, but even he didn’t know how deeply it all went. He didn’t know how deep her and Doyle’s history went, he didn’t know what he had done to her in that warehouse – not all of it.

At the thought of that place Emily brought up a hand to rub where the branded clover had been. She had had the scars lasered away when they were healed enough because she couldn’t deal with seeing it on her. She knew he had his grip on her mentally without having the physical reminder of it as well. He had hurt her more than she knew how to handle. Physically, mentally, emotionally; he had been a bull in the china shop that was her mind and had crushed her and left her for dead.

‘’I remember when you…’’ The words got caught in her throat for a second and she looked up at the sky to try and blink away any tears that were forming. ‘’-when you used to hold me in your arms, and you used to tell me of the life we would have together.’’ That had seemed so long ago now, a different time and place when Emily Prentiss was Lauren Reynolds. When they had shared a bed, shared coffee in the morning, shared secret words in French which only meant something to them. It had been another world in their villa just outside a small village in the south of France and one that Emily had almost wanted to cling onto and savour. But it wouldn’t have worked, even if she had managed to get him out of that life, he had been right. He would have been arrested and everything shattered. So, Emily had to shatter it herself to make sure she was in control and didn’t get too hurt.

Emily hadn’t meant to love him, that hadn’t been the plan. She was meant to pretend to, to worm her way into his life and get a hold of every little secret he told her so she could wire it back to her team and arrest him. But she had let herself get too deep because he had fallen in love with her and she couldn’t help but do the same. It was fucked up, she knew that. Fucked up to love the terrorist she had been sent in to gain dirt on and arrest, but it had happened and there was nothing she could have done to stop it. She hadn’t let it get in the way of her work though. In the end Emily had a job to do and when she had found out of the attack he was planning that could affect thousands of lives, nothing else mattered. She pushed her feelings to the side and did her job because he wasn’t about to win over her.

But in the end, he had.

‘’I loved you and you knew that. You knew I loved you and you used it against me just as I had against you-’’ Emily couldn’t stop a tear from falling onto her cheek and she quickly took her hand out of her pocket to brush it away, as if it had never happened.

‘’-and I hate you for it.’’ She could almost hear his laugh, feel his breath on her neck and Emily closed her eyes to try and will the feeling away. Doyle was clutching that piece of her so tightly she knew he wouldn’t let it go.

The worst thing of all was she couldn’t talk to anyone about this. Emily was terrified if she ever went into depths about her relationship with Doyle then the team would reject her and rightfully so. But she couldn’t take that chance because losing them again would only break her completely. They were her family and had been for so long, but Emily was scared she wasn’t theirs anymore. She wished she could talk to someone about this, it hadn’t been a topic she had even broached with her therapist, but it would forever be one of those things she would have to keep quiet and accept. And it wasn’t just that she couldn’t speak of. Emily couldn’t tell them of how his hands had roughly grabbed at her skin and her hair, had forced her to take him until she was sobbing – at which point he had pulled her to the place Declan had supposedly been killed.

Oh, what Emily wouldn’t do for that boy. She had known from the moment Doyle had told her he was his son that she would have to protect him. She had refused to let him grow up like his father, wanting him to have a happy and normal childhood with friends and a loving family. It was what he deserved. He was the only innocent one out of all of this and Emily had to keep him safe. When she had got the call saying he had gone missing her heart had fallen to the ground. Emily couldn’t lose the boy she had once toyed with the idea of being the mother to even if it had been for a split second.

‘’I would do it all again for him, I hope you know that.’’ Her voice was barely a whisper as she chewed at the inside of her lip. ‘’I’d let you break me a thousand more times if it meant keeping him safe. But he’s okay, he’s happy and that’s because I made sure he got the life he deserves. So, you can break me down piece by piece until there’s nothing left of me but I know I will have done good in this world by protecting Declan.’’

Emily’s eyes focused back onto the ground again as though waiting for something to happen. In the dead of night, she half expected him to turn up at her door, completely not dead as she had been twice in his life. It wouldn’t have surprised her and maybe now, this time she would have accepted the long-awaited darkness she had felt before. But what if she had never come back from dying after all? Was she simply a ghost now as she once had been before? Creating a whole plan to take him down and stop the terrorist attack he had been planning. Was she the ghost who had slipped out of the BAU unnoticed ready to face her demons on her own? Had she been alive through any of this? Emily Prentiss knew how to be a ghost exceptionally well, but did she know how to be alive?

The shrill ring of her phone caused Emily to stir from where she had been staring at the grave. With a fluid motion she took her phone out of her pocket having done the action thousands of times before. A glance at the caller ID told her it was JJ calling and Emily couldn’t help the small smile flickering across her lips. If there was anyone who could make her feel alive, it was Jennifer Jareau, even if the blonde didn’t know it. Her touch made Emily feel human again, warmed her up like the sun against the snow. She was the light to pull her out of the dark and right now, Emily was very much in the dark.

‘’JJ? Is everything okay? Do we have a case?’’ The tone of her voice was almost hopeful that she could jump headfirst into work and ignore the way she was crumbling. Even as she spoke to her, she could still feel Doyle’s presence there, out the corner of her eye.

‘’No, no, we don’t.’’ Came the sweet voice at the other end of the phone, accompanied by a small laugh clearly at the way she had sounded ready for some work to do. JJ knew how much Emily didn’t like Thanksgiving. ‘’I was just wondering…I know you don’t celebrate it, but my plans got cancelled last minute and everyone else is going to Rossi’s…I just wanted to know if you wanted to join us?’’

Of course, she was trying to get her to join in on the holiday, to spend time with those she loved yet was so scared of losing once more. Emily closed her eyes again to try and keep any emotions in that were bursting out. She couldn’t, not when she was in this state. She was at the cemetery talking to her dead self who also happened to manifest as her dead killer. How could she walk into Rossi’s house which would surely be full of happiness and laughter and pretend as if she felt the same? How could she pretend that she even deserved any of that?

Emily didn’t realise she had sighed at Jennifer’s question at first, but the tone of the blonde’s voice made it clear that that was exactly what she had done.

‘’Em, it won’t be the same without you there. Please? Rossi says he can make you something different if that’s what you want. I promise you wont regret it. We all miss when you don’t spend time with us, please…’’

How could she deny that? How could she deny JJ anything? But the words were getting choked up in her throat and she had to take a deep breath to stop herself from crying on the phone.

‘’Hey-‘’ JJ spoke softly, as if she could feel all of Emily’s troubles and hardships through the phone. ‘’-I know you’re struggling Em; don’t think I haven’t seen it. So how about this? We go to Rossi’s and have a good time and then tonight we go back to yours and we talk about it, okay?’’

What had Emily Prentiss done to deserve an angel like Jennifer Jareau? She wasn’t sure. She took a deep breath in before letting it out slowly but shakily. ‘’Yeah, okay.’’

‘’Great. Should I come pick you up?’’

Emily looked back at the grave, almost as if she couldn’t pull herself away from it. The hold it had on her was enough for it to pull her back into the ground, back into the coffin which was supposed to have her body in it. How was she ever meant to get away from the fact that she had died, come back to life and yet it didn’t feel like she had been revived? Her chest seemed to tighten, and it felt as if she was falling…falling into the ear-

‘’Emily?’’ JJ’s voice broke her spiral once more, concern clearly visible.

‘’Yes, please. Give me like half an hour okay? I-I went out for a walk.’’

‘’Okay, I’ll see you in a bit. Call me if you need me.’’ And with that she hung up and Emily was in the silence once again. It was only after the call, did she feel a cold shiver run down her spine, the sort in which the phrase ‘someone had walked over your grave’ would have been used for. She knew who had walked over her grave, or at least who had fallen into it and Emily began to wonder if she could ever be pulled out of death-like life after all.

Staring hard at the ground, phone tight in her hand Emily finally felt herself break away from the spot where she had been standing for longer than she’d realised. Time had run away from her and truthfully if JJ hadn’t of called it would have done so more. Sighing once more, she put her phone in her pocket and wiped her eyes to make sure every tear was gone. There were only a few words she had left for Ian Doyle, at least for now.

‘’Au revoir, j'espère que tu pourriras en enfer.’’ _Goodbye, I hope you rot in hell._

And with that Emily started to make her way back up the path, the sun higher in the sky now, the frost on the ground melted to the point where you would have thought it hadn’t been there. It was cold still, the weak sun barely reigning it’s heat down onto the Earth, but Emily felt warmer at the thought of spending time with those she loved the most. Maybe she wasn’t a ghost after all.


End file.
